April 2011

Do you remember A Year of Tees? It was Keith Walsh side-project (beyond running Turtlehead) that made a new t-shirt available for sale every day. It was meant to finish on December 31st 2010, but after receiving a number of requests Keith opened up the vault and made all the designs available for sale again, somewhat indefinitely (I’m sure it won’t be forever, but there’s no end cap this time around). He’s just increased the available offerings once again by making it possible to purchase every t-shirt design as a hoodie… and they say HYA doesn’t talk about hoodies anymore, pfft!

I like to give credit where it is due, and I’ve got to say that Tee Hunter is absolutely killing it at the moment, he’s finding a lot of good stuff and this interview with Jake Nickell of Threadless fame shows that he can produce his own quality content too. I’m really glad that Liam tried to tread some new ground with this interview, since anyone who has been in the tee game for more than 5 minutes knows the story behind Threadless, hell, they even released the Threadless book last year but the mainstream media (and my word I feel like Fox News when I type that) continues to treat their whole business model as some kind an oddity and ask the same questions over an over (which is the thing that often frustrates me about Johnny Cupcakes interviews).

Enclothe have to be one of the most consistently excellent brands out there, and Derek has come up with the goods once again with this Spring release. I could waste my time explaining why the shirts are good, but instead I’m just going to tell you to do what the infographic says and ‘go check it out’.

Adam continues his impressive streak of quality articles with an interview with Miles To Go founder Greg Kerr. There’s a lot of good advice in there for budding t-shirt brand owners from someone who has been around the block a few times and has learned a lot about the industry.

The two brothers from Zurich, lets call them “Tiger” and “Elephant”, started screenprinting in 2009. They set up a working space in their cellar and started printing t-shirts with homemade wooden screens. Wearing their own designs was their main goal and their biggest joy. They thought, why not share this joy with others?

So they printed more t-shirts and ended up having an online store! At Tiger And Elephant it’s all about being creative and having fun! Each design tells a different story, each artist tells his in a different way. Spread the word and let the Tiger And Elephant Pack be growing!

As I looked through the images I was sent in the e-mail I just kept nodding and saying “yes, yes, yes” because this line from SUTSU is very impressive. It all looks good with the big, bold and usually simple graphics, and 95% of the pieces are printed on EarthPositive garments. If you’re unaware, EarthPositive is a range from Continental clothing which is 100% organic and it’s production is done in a low emission way, in fact, I think it might actually be carbon negative (production takes carbon emissions out of the air instead of polluting it).

My buddies over at Akumu Ink are industrious fellows, they’ve been busy recently, but so have I so I haven’t managed to cover everything they’ve been up to, but I really like this idea they’ve had for their packaging so I just had to share it. I’ll let Aldora (Mrs. Akumu Ink) explain:

We’ve just came up with a new packaging that features a new wax seal with Akumu Ink in its Japanese characters. We want to make it a great experience for our customers when they receive the package; Hence: -> open the shipping package to find a stained envelope addressed to “My Dearly Departed” -> turn the package to open it, to find a wax seal -> open the wax seal -> to find the shirts they’ve ordered.

The great part about the wax seal is that in the end, they get to keep it whole, because it doesn’t fall apart, so it would be a great safe-keeping.

Pretty cool huh? It should probably be noted that you’ll only get this special packaging if you order 2 or more shirts. It’s good to see brands doing stuff like this with their packaging, because it helps to round out the brand as a whole and also make the purchasing experience much more enjoyable and memorable. As someone that gets sent a lot of t-shirts in the mail I am also happy to see a shirt just sliding out of a poly mailer or a thick paper envelope, but when people put in that bit of extra effort it does make it all a bit more exciting, and I’d be likely to tell people about it the purchase as well, so it’s probably a good marketing tool too.

I was drawn to this shirt because of it’s simplicity, it’s just a pleasingly straightforward image that says the two things that you need to make something tasty. I was completely unaware that Salt & Fat is also an excellent food blog that I’ve squandered a few minutes browsing just now when I know I should be focused on blogging not beets.

If you’re after food t-shirts, then it might be worth checking out this list of 200 food t-shirts I wrote a while back.

If I’ve timed this right, this post will be going live during William and Kate’s wedding, which seems appropriate even though I doubt anyone that is actually interesting in the wedding will be scouring the net for tees right now. I don’t know if you can see the text at the bottom of this crest, but it says “IV days off, cheers” which I’m fairly sure is what most people are excited about rather than the wedding itself.

Fun fact, Kate Middleton’s parents own a house a couple of miles up the road from me, maybe I’ll see the Royal couple out on a hike someday.

Dadawan, now there’s a veteran of the indie tee business. Recently they dropped a new range of 10 one-colour black on white design, just about all of which are of a distinctly European style. I know that the term ‘European’ is almost pointless since it’s a large continent made up of many cultures, but I looked at this new range and thought to myself “only in Europe.” The shirts are €25 each which is a bit pricey compared to most other stores, but if you like a design enough I’m sure you’ll be able to part with the extra few Euros without too much pain.

Okay, remember a couple of days ago when I said I wasn’t an Angry Birds addict? This is how my morning routine went: “wake up, pick up iPhone, look at e-mail, look at Tweetdeck… try to blow up those weird pig things.” I give in, you win Angry Birds, you win. Thankfully they don’t win enough for me to want to order one of these shirts from NerdyShirts, but I’m sure some of you will find it harder to resist.

I wonder how often a week goes by that I don’t mention a Star Wars t-shirt, we’re on two this week at least, I’m not even that big of a fan!

Ian Leino has really stepped up a gear in terms of his releases recently, both on daily tee sites and in his own store, the latter makes it seem to me as if business is going well for him, so hopefully that means we’ll be seeing more from him soon.

The above design is available on RIPT right now and for the next 18 hours (at the time this post goes live) for $10 as a tee, $38 as a hoodie, $15 in kids sizes, and if you want your baby to see the dark side onesies are $18 (I wonder how many of those RIPT sell a day?). If you catch this post after the design has entered the graveyard at RIPT, fear not, Ian has got the design in his store too, printed on a 3/4 sleeve raglan shirt which I think looks pretty good. The shirt is $19 but you can get 10% off with the coupon codeVADER10 until midnight tonight, and I would presume that coupon works store-wide and not just on this design.

Long time Seibei fans may well be aware that this is not a new design, or even an old design in a new colourway, which was kind of the point of the time-limited weekly releases that SEIBEI has been doing for a couple of months now, but there’s actually a pretty nice story behind this one. When the “I Like to say things and eat stuff” design was still in the store as a ‘permanent’ piece and the stock was dwindling, an international customer made an order, and as sometimes happens with international orders (or any orders for that matter) the tee got lost in the mail. Between the purchase and realising that the tee had gone missing or was now being worn by the coolest looking postman on the block, David ran out of stock of the design, so the customer never got their shirt. That is until now, of course, when that person and the rest of us have the chance to pick up this slice of SEIBEI history.

The shirt is available from a few days ago (sowwy!) until April 30th).

I’m more than a little bit late to the Angry Birds party, having resisted that particular time-sink until a few weeks ago when I downloaded one of the free versions of the game (along with Words With Friends, on which I my username is hideyourarms if you fancy a game). It’s fun, but thankfully I haven’t become obsessed with it… yet.

Concrete Rocket have one of the best names in the business, and the name of this tee is pretty cool too, but I find this design to be pretty generic compared to the rest of their offerings. There tends to be a theme of graffiti art running through their line, something which is really evident in this piece, and whilst I still think it’s quite wearable, it’s definitely not their best work.

Ignore what it says on that lovely infographic about this sale ending on April 25th, because Sistine have extended their sale (which takes their $36 t-shirts down to $25 a piece) to the end of this week, so now I don’t feel so bad about taking the weekend off and missing this sale the first time around!